No, this has been a known fact on Wikipedia for years.[1] It has only recently gained mainstream attention after that xkcd comic, but it had been bandied about

No, this has been a known fact on Wikipedia for years.[1] It has only recently gained mainstream attention after that xkcd comic, but it had been bandied about on reddit and elsewhere long before that. The generally accepted practice on Wikipedia of starting an article with, "[subject] is a [descriptor]? [superclass] that..." means eventually you get broader in scope until you wind up at, surprise surprise, philosophy. Of those articles that don't follow the pattern, the vast majority get stuck in loops. You wouldn't be able to avoid this phenomena without drastically changing how encyclopedic articles are written. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that if you went through a paper encyclopedia and "followed the link" by flipping to the article of the first appropriate word in a given article, you'd see the same pattern emerge. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy